Buy Space Pirates and Zombies(SPAZ)

Recommended By Curators

"Very fun, very arcady....though dieing can be extremly costly. This game is a soft grind, doing repeatable type quests while painting a map."

Reviews

“The developers are planning to continue expanding the game in the future, but why wait? It's already great now…”
9/10 – Atomic Gamer “But suffice to say Space Pirates and Zombies isn't just a grand open-world space action RPG in the tradition of Star Control. It's also a rare expression of zombies that belongs alongside Dead Rising and Atom Zombie Smasher.”
A – Gameshark “It’s a very solid game that is obviously made out of passion and is a great example of the indie renaissance we’ve been experiencing lately. In my opinion, it’s one of the best things that $15 can buy.”
90/100 – RTS Guru

About This Game

At its core, Space Pirates and Zombies is an action based, skill oriented, top down space combat game. It’s similar to the ones we knew and loved in years past, but now using full physics simulation and modern graphics for those oh so pretty explosions. But as you dig deeper, SPAZ becomes much more.
Instead of flying a single ship, you are in charge of an ever growing and evolving fleet, unlocking the rich tactical elements of SPAZ, all accessed at the touch of a button. Issue orders, change ships, apply fleet AI settings, all on the fly. At any moment the battle can change, and the Tactics Panel gives you the tools to make the battle turn in your favor.
As a layer on top of the action and tactics, we have a detailed technology and levelup system akin to what you would expect from an RPG. Learn to build new ships by destroying your enemies. Explore the galaxy to find components, use your hard earned research points to unlock their potential, and then customize every aspect of your new fleet.
Finally, there is the universe in which all this strife and adventure takes place. SPAZ features a persistent randomly generated Galaxy populated with story elements, factions, enemies, missions, items, to provide you with a unique experience each time you play. While you are struggling to survive, uncover the secret of an ever expanding Zombie infestation that spreads by establishing its own real time multi-tiered ecosystem.

When I first got SPAZ, I remember playing about 5 minutes and just not being interested; I never gave it a chance and now I really regret my initial judgements.Space Pirates and Zombies is a top-down, twin stick style shooter set in a randomly generated solar system. You operate out of a main “mothership” and tackle quests and missions piloting smaller craft alongside AI Wingmen. The combat is difficult, but rewardingly so, and requires thought and sound tactics especially at the later stages of the game. I definitely judged this book by it’s cover when it was first released, but it is certainly no run of the mill twin stick shooter.The RPG elements are shockingly deep; you gain levels, rescue crew specialists upgrade weapons, collect ship designs, outfit your wingmen, and participate in a simple but very effective economy trading rez (currency), goons (crew) and data (xp).Visually the art is great, lots of vibrant colors, really unique ship designs, combat effects are satisfyingly meaty, characters are well drawn and the dialogue, while crude, is interesting and humorous.The only issue I have come across is playing SPAZ via in home streaming. Considering the visual fidelity of the game, it seems like my gaming rig has an abnormally hard time encoding the video of it. I’ve found that using “DirectX Compatibility” and “Capture Mouse” helps make it playable, but there are still numerous visual artifacts and glitching seen on the remote computer.Overall a brilliant game, and I’m truly looking forward to the sequel!

I finished this game in 64 hours. That wasn't a wasted time, not at all. Because I like tactical strategies and I like RPGs. This game is mainly strategy with active pause. RPG elements is mostly for technical purposes like skills and leveling. So don't expect tons of talking. But be prepared for tons of space explosions, destroyed and captured star bases, lasers, missiles, dozens of skills, upgrades, ships and all that stuff which should be in game like that. Yes, this game has it all. And all of that in open, procedurally generated world.

VERDICT:If you like space adventures, you will like this one.If you don't, better change your mind.If you really don't, why the hell did you start to read this at all?

Space Pirates and Zombies (SPAZ) is a top down space shooter game with a level up system for technology and a rudimentary economy system. The majority of the game is space combat similar to the old multiplayer game “Subspace” but with no power ups (and you kind of design your own ships).

SPAZ technically has a story but you probably won’t pay attention to it for most of the game since you’ll be exploring the galaxy for long stretches between “story missions.” You play part of the crew of the Clockwork, a ragtag mother ship headed for the galactic core to mine precious minerals. Unfortunately the galaxy is mostly controlled by the UTA, a powerful organization kind of like the Empire in Star Wars, except not really evil. The UTA has its own problems though, the colonies are rebelling, and everywhere you go in the galaxy there will be fighting between UTA and colonial warships.

The game’s galaxy is randomly generated when you start a new campaign and is made up of about 100 different star systems randomly connected like a spider’s web (if you’ve played FTL, it kind of looks like that, only much bigger). Each star system has a number next to it, representing the “tech level” of the star system. In practical terms, you can think of this as the “difficulty” of the star system. In order to progress to different stars, you need to somehow unlock them. For example if you go to one star, it might be connected to 2-3 other stars and each of those 2-3 stars has a separate warp gate that needs to be unlocked. You can unlock a gate by either killing all the UTA ships around it, or by bribing the UTA to let you through.

This bribery brings up an important aspect of the game. Every time you enter a star system you are given a relationship status with the colonists and UTA. If you’re hostile to one of the 2 factions, they’ll attack you on sight and you won’t be able to trade with them. To bribe the UTA, you need to be on friendly terms with them. You change your relationship status by taking missions for that faction. For example to raise status with UTA, take missions destroying colony ships (which will lower your colony relationship). The relationships aren’t galaxy wide. You can be friends with UTA in one system and their enemy in the system right next door. You do not get chased from planet to planet no matter how bad your relationship is.

Combat in SPAZ is pretty straightforward. You control one of three ships in your little fleet and can switch freely between them. The mothership stays in a safe place rebuilding your ships if they get destroyed. When enemy (or allied) ships are destroyed, they drop a “blueprint” which you can pick up to unlock that type of ship. Later ships require more copies of the same blueprint. For example to unlock a particular fighter, just destroy it and pick up the blueprint it drops. “Data clusters” dropped by destroyed ships are the “experience” of the game, and you gather those to level up. On level up, you can put skill points into various technologies, such as shields, beams, missiles, etc. This allows you to use more powerful tech (that you have to buy separately). Money in the game is a mineral called rez that you can mine from asteroids or pick up from destroyed ships. The money is used to buy tech from space stations (as long as you’re friendly with that faction). New tech items are actually pretty scarce; you need to make do with your combat skills most of the time.

Pros:+The game is surprisingly complex. This would be a great game if I had no backlog to keep me going. Years ago when I had not many games to choose from, I would have spent a lot of time on SPAZ.+There is no difficulty option, but if you’re having a hard time, just go to a lower level star system. There is nothing keeping you from backtracking or skipping entire star systems. Also, very often a star system will have open battles between UTA and colony ships when you are neutral to both factions. You can just sit there in the battle and wait for a ship to be blown up so you can snag the data/blueprints. Obviously this works better on high level star systems where you’re too weak to fight either side by yourself.+Interesting weapon / defense dynamic. Beams do extra damage to shields, cannons do extra damage to armor, and missiles do extra damage to hull. Your ships can only load 1 or 2 weapon types each so you need to have a nice variety in weapons to be able to take on all enemies. Plus, combat is very fast paced and some weapons are easier to hit enemies with than others (missiles are homing).

Cons:-As I mentioned above, new tech is few and far between. A star system will probably only be selling 1 item, and it probably won’t be what you’re looking for. And in order to actually buy the item, you need to be friendly with the faction that’s selling it. That means doing missions for them (and pissing off the other faction).-The game is a tremendous grind. The faction relationship thing mentioned above is one example. Another is unlocking additional ships. You have to hunt down and destroy specific ship types to unlock them. Not so hard in the beginning, but in the end these are massive battle cruisers that can easily kick your ♥♥♥. And you need like 10 blueprints to unlock them.-The technology level up system is weird. You need to save up skill points to unlock higher levels of tech, for example unlocking level 3 missiles requires 3 skill points, level 4 requires 4 skill points. Yet the game will keep nagging you if you try to save the points. If you try to diversify, you’ll end up at a disadvantage. (If you’re playing an RPG, you don’t put a point into every skill).

Overall, I’d give Space Pirates and Zombies a tentative thumbs up. You can sink a lot of time into the game if this is your cup of tea, but for me there’s too much grinding. The pluses outweigh the negatives, but only just barely.

While I'm a bit late into the game of reviewing SPAZ, writing it anyway couldn't hurt. Space Pirates and Zombies is a action-strategy space shooter with elements of random generation. While you have some control over how random it is, it only serves to increase or decrease the difficulty in the long run.

Gameplay: The gameplay is pretty solid. You pilot your ship around with WASD keys, and shooting your weaponry with the mouse. What makes it special if that you don't point and shoot, but the direction of your ship controls where your shots are. If you place a weapon on the front of your ship, expect it to shoot forward until the higher class ships which have rotating turret mounts that do just that. Even then, anything other than lasers will still need to lead the target, as nothing is hitscan. This makes shooting more skill based.

At the same time, you have to pilot your ship to avoid incoming shots from enemy ships. This ends up leading to dog fight type scenarios where you and your opponent are dodging around each other trying to get a shot in. This is where a lot of the enjoyment of the game is, since a lot of battles will be decided on whether or not you can out-maneuver the AI, especially on higher difficulties when the enemies become too strong to kill in a head-on fight.

As you kill enemies, you can pick up orbs of Data to level up and gain research points. The tech tree is nothing complex, since it is mostly just a direct % increase in damage and other stats for each weapon or ship subsystem. This is however needed, since more powerful versions of equipment are unusable until you level up that system. But before you can even equip something, you must acquire the blueprints of each item. Naturally, higher level equipment requires more blueprints, which can be obtained by the faction bases. Either buy from them, or blow it up and loot the charred remains of the base, if you can.

The Bounty Hunter system adds in some extra challenge to the mix, if you choose to allow them to spawn. Killing enemies within their territory increases the bounty on your head. Eventually, if left unchecked, the hunters will come after you in an attempt to collect that bounty. The higher your bounty, the higher the chance. You also have the chance to be extorted on the way out of one of their systems. Failure to pay and you'll need to fight them off. You'd think this would increase your bounty further, but instead gives you respect, which lowers the bounty. If the bounty falls into the negative, you start to gain respect points. This acts as a buffer before you will start accumulating a bounty, and ensures you won't be attacked until you drain all of your respect.

Another way to gain respect, as well as money and Data, is to fight in arena matches set up by the hunters. As you progress, harder challenges are unlocked, each with 3 difficulties. If you want to avoid ambushes every are or two, you may want to take advantages of these arena matches. They can even be repeated for a lesser reward if you are out of fresh fights. And if you really have no other option, you can pay your bounty off yourself. As a whole, this system adds more challenge to the game, which is welcome when not playing on the highest difficulty.

There's much more to gameplay, but I don't wish to drag on. So I'll end with one major flaw I found, and that mostly comes with the late game. If you fail to kill one of the smallest ships but weakened it to critical health, it will flee. For several thousand feet. If you don't switch to a small ship of your own that is just as fast, it will get away, and you'll spend minutes at a time waiting for it to come back. This becomes a huge pace breaker, and sometimes even causes you to be put in more difficult situations in the late game, when enemies can spawn just by you staying in an area for long. Maybe if they would retreat from battle, leaving the area entirely, this wouldn't be an issue.

Story: The setting is that of a far future, and space travel has advanced to that of colonizing other star systems. This is mostly thanks to the currency of the game, Rez. This subtance is mined from deposits floating in space to craft vessels. In order to become rich, many set off to mining colonies to gather as much Rez as they can. Legend also has it, there is a grand deposit in the center of the universe. This deposit is what our protagonists are looking for. The only problem is getting there. Warp gates between star systems are guarded by the UTA, the police space force, essentially. Not only this, but the grand warp gates to the planets near the center are locked down tight. A nice twist comes in the zombie part of the title, which you discover upon finally reaching these center systems. I'd elaborate, but I don't wish to spoil it.

Graphics: I care very little for graphics as long as they are serviceable. Meanwhile, SPAZ has great graphics. Each ship looks nice, if simple at times, and the lighting is bright and colorful.

Sound: The music of the game mostly boils down to ambient noise, but there are a few tracks here or there that are enjoyable. Cutscenes are also narrated by TotalBiscuit, who does a fine enough job. Though even he says he did terribly, and it is clear enough that he could have done better if he tried. The sound effects are all well and good, meanwhile. Each weapon has its own shot sound effects, and the sounds of another ship being hit are clear to hear. But after awhile, hearing the pew pew pews of the game gets old.

Overall, the game is a terrific time. It serves as a challenge when it needs to, and is just pure fun to shoot stuff in space. I'd recommend this to anyone who thinks they might enjoy this when shown any gameplay.

Personally, I like to play games while I drink (hey, it keeps the replayability factor up when I forget :-P), watch Netflix and BS with buddies. This game is great for that in the sense that I can step away from it while it's running and not come back to a dead toon or missed out on something extremely important. Also (bonus points) if I get a little too far gone, chances are good that I again didn't miss something that I can't look back on the log to figure out what happend. I think this game may have been made specifically for me.

I love leveling up. I love keeping an eye on resources. I love the discovery aspect. I love upgrading and discovering new weapon/ship models. Oh and there's a fun storyline with multiple characters. The best part is that each one of them are friggin pricks! I hate dainty little do-gooders when it's a universe they just wouldn't survive in. Every character I've come across in this game thus far has been such a friggin @sshole and I love it!

I can't wait until SPAZ 2 comes out if it's anything like the original!

The game started out sounding very nice.It sounded, and looked, from the trailers, to be very enjoyable.Then I bought it and played for a little while.The concepts are all there, they're all done as well as can be expected, and, if it were paced a little better, the game would be pretty good.The problem is right there, though - pacing. Half of the time I was playing, I was just mining rocks to try and get more money to upgrade my ships. When I finally managed to get into combat, my enemies would take a small amount of damage and just run from me. Over half of my combat time was chasing down enemies in the vast nothingness that exists everywhere in search of that one last ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ needed to complete the mission.

The style and idea behind this game are appealing, but the game is made unpleasant by several glaring design flaws.

You only ever seem to have around 3 ships to control at once. That doesn't really give you much in the way of tactical options. You're frequently put into situations where you go up against way more ships than that, so it feels strange to have only one large ship and two small ships and be expected to feel like you're being strategic/tactical.

The issue with the tactical options is compounded by the need to grind a lot to have weapons strong enough to take on foes of a given tech level. The damage system is interesting, you have shields, then armor, then hull. Beams are strong against shields, cannons are strong against armor, and launchers are strong against hull. However, according to the DEVS THEMSELVES, a good strategy is to only focus on upgrading one of beams/cannons. What was the point of the damage model if you're just going to suggest people not worry about trying to match up the correct weapon based on the situation of the enemy ships? Because I didn't know about this, I was getting to the point where most of my time was spent grinding to at least 1.5x the tech level of the enemies I would go against. It seems like the designer didn't really think about how the damage and tech level system really affected the fun of the gameplay.

There's a lot of time spent just doing repetitive mission types over and over again to get data so you can level up your tech. It gets old after awhile, even though there's a decent variety of mission types, once you play a certain type once, it isn't really fun to play it again. The only thing to keep you going is a desire to progress through the story or feel like you're "being productive", but really you're just doing the same stuff over and over again. It doesn't make for very fun gameplay.

The whole idea of the Bounty Hunters is also an issue. Bounty Hunters in space is really thematically appropriate, but the way it's implemented in this world just adds unpleasant busy work. Every time you do missions you accrue "bounty". Whenever you jump, if your bounty is high enough and your near a bounty hunter lair, you'll be attacked by powerful ships and probably will have to reload a save. The only way to get rid of bounty is to go to a lair and pay them, or complete "arena challenges" which net you some Rez and relieve some bounty. The arena challenges are very fun, but I frequently found myself in a situation where I had maxed out my Rez so I just had to pay a bunch of money and never really felt a reason to play the challenges. It's just a resource sink without much fun behind. If it was possible to beat bounty hunters when they attacked you I would consider this fixed. There's plenty of other ways it could be improved, of course.

Other than that, there's just lots of little annoyances throughout the game that indicate a lack of polish. One petty example is that, on escort missions, the ship you are escorting might have cloaking, but will be invisible to you, which makes it difficult to tell where you need to be. Escort missions have other problems, like the behavior of the escorted ship (it will sometimes go in the opposite direction, won't follow you, etc...). This is just one example of a minor design issue. There's others; like the heavy reliance on saving and loading (breaking immersion and breaking up the flow of the gameplay).

Overall, it's insulting to Mound and Blade to call this game "Mount and Blade in Space". Mount and Blade lacks a lot of the issues that make SPAZ unpleasant (after a few hours of playing). Unlike games like Mount and Blade, I just never feel like I'm becoming more powerful. I don't feel like I'm interacting with the galaxy because all the solar systems are very closed off from each other.

If you're looking for a game that actually gives you a sense of strategy, tactics, and power, you should look into Starsector (formerly Starfarer), which is currently playable though in-development. I think it does a better job of providing the sort of experience this game was trying to provide.

I think the name SPAZ actually make the game seem less than it actually is. The zombie aspect of the game is more like Homeworld Cataclysm than another dumb zombie shooter game. The game itself is very solid and to a point very satisfying with all the ship customization and upgrades available to the player. The little downside is, in my opinion, that it drags on a bit towards the end of the game and tends to be quite repetetive. Nevertheless, I recommend it to anyone who likes solid sci-fi games and doesn't necessarily want all the drama and weight of a AAA title.

as a first time player i must say this is an excellent 2d space shooter with rpg elements... 4 directional thrusters and an all stop button.with the upgradeable ships and the massive starchart, i look forward to spaz 2 in multiplayer.

Definitely the strongest point for me was the atmospheric nature of this game which pushed me to complete it twise. The combat gets more exciting after you level up, get larger ships and stronger weapons. It has some strategy elements and the combat will require you to have proper ship set, timing, aiming and moving if you want to complete it on harder difficulties. I personally had some troble getting used to the moving system, but it became natural after little bit.Unfortunately the story isn't great and the whole moving from system to system gets repetitive after a while because of small amount of intriguing encounters, yet that serves as a push to try new things, like different ship and weapon sets or different relations between forses. In the end it gets you even more interested in it.

Build a ship, customize a ship, build another ship, crash both ships. You'll never get tired of drifting through the wonderfully atmosphere world of SPAZ, where there are plenty of zombies to kill and goons to space.

I've been hooked on this for a while, it's easy to pick up and play with just enough complexity to keep you going. I find myself in that "one more turn" mentality. It's an upgrade-based game, and that does mean a bit of grind, which may seem like a dirty word to use, but it is the sort of 'waves of enemies' and 'perfect your game' kind of deal. It definitely doesn't feel like a chore, and stays fun and addictive.

Big applause to the devs for breaking up gameplay style in how the chapters work. This mechanic kept the gameplay fresh and exciting!

I love the elements of this which call to mind old-school shareware sci-fi classics. The exploration, resource-gathering, ship design, and combat are all very rewarding, and I like the cast of renegade characters. Highly recommended, despite a somewhat slow set of starting missions.

8/10 Something new and rare. Gets stale after a while but other than that its great.

Could need more story/dialog since you'll feel really alone in space sometimes what makesit very lengthy/long-winded. Yet Im already waiting for the second installment of this series.Not bad at all. Recommended for action/strategy fans.